


time and time again

by kenopsia (indie)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Complications, Do Overs, Gen, John is Sir Not Appearing in the Film, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, Timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-10
Updated: 2013-10-10
Packaged: 2017-12-29 00:14:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/998573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indie/pseuds/kenopsia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“In 2018, we finally understand how to move through time in a non-linear fashion, and for a fee, you can spend ten minutes correcting a past wrong from your personal past.”</p><p>“And you picked today…” Sherlock drawled, “because you think I am going to overdose today?”</p><p>“You are going to die,” Mycroft confirms, “and my last memory of you is fighting with you in this hellhole. About what, the details are lost to me.”</p><p>“You want me to go back to school, and go to rehab, and stop ignoring Mummy’s psychiatric advice,” Sherlock said, frowning. “This story is creative, Mycroft, and I’ll admit, you have some solid details here. However,” Sherlock poked at a scar on Mycroft’s hand, scratched it with a fingernail; ran the tap and pushed it under. He peered at Mycroft’s hair, and worry lines at his forehead. “You may leave now.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	time and time again

**Author's Note:**

> I thought I would take a break from the daemon au for a minute with a ficlet and things got away with me. I played fast and loose with time travel, um, if you pick at it, it will probably unravel. Ye be warned.

After Sherlock dropped out of Cambridge, there was a grimy, miserable flat on Montague. Days passed like years there, and he spent finite eternities sprawled out across a tattered couch, racing thoughts dulled by the only thing he had found in two decades of searching.

There was a long time, after he first discovered the melancholy flatline of self-medicating, where time seemed arbitrary. It was during one of those times that Sherlock blearily stumbled into his narrow bathroom for some facsimile of a shower, and found his brother sitting on the counter. Under the single, flickering overhead lightbulb, Mycroft looked sickly. Actually, Sherlock amended, peering at his face, Mycroft looked _old._

“What are you doing here?” he snapped. Sherlock might have been embarrassed at being caught being in just his pants, but he was in his own flat.

“Oh Sherlock,” Mycroft sighed, eyes soft.

Sherlock wanted to gag. “Do you have a reason to be here? Your diet is obviously going swimmingly. I’ve never seen you look so compatible with standard size doorways?”

“You are going to overdose today,” Mycroft says.

“Lovely deduction,” Sherlock snarls. “ _Leave._ ”

“I only have a few minutes to explain,” Mycroft says, and Sherlock just saw him a few months ago when he intruded to tell him that he was _upsetting Mummy,_ and he should _attend holiday dinners, at least,_ but Sherlock notices two scars that he did not have then, and his hairline.

“Oh, wait,” Sherlock says, interested despite himself, pressing a fingertip to his bottom lip. “Let me get it.”

“I don’t have time,” Mycroft says, and he looks regretful. “I’m sorry, Sherlock. And I’m sorry about what happens next.”

“In 2018, we finally understand how to move through time in a non-linear fashion, and for a fee, you can spend ten minutes correcting a past wrong from your personal past.”

“And you picked today…” Sherlock drawled, “because you think I am going to overdose today?”

“You are going to die,” Mycroft confirms, “and my last memory of you is fighting with you in this hellhole. About what, the details are lost to me.”

“You want me to go back to school, and go to rehab, and stop ignoring Mummy’s psychiatric advice,” Sherlock said, frowning. “This story is creative, Mycroft, and I’ll admit, you have some solid details here.” Sherlock poked at a scar on Mycroft’s hand, scratched it with a fingernail; ran the tap and pushed it under. He peered at Mycroft’s hair, an worry lines at his forehead. “You may leave now.”

Ten minutes after Mycroft leaves, a man arrives in the doorway and Sherlock spends two weeks sectioned. He throws tantrums and wheedles and pleads and insults and tries to blackmail in turns, and receives only an ASBO and a diagnosis of actual sociopathy in return.

He’d never contemplated suicide before, but after his stay in the hospital ward he finds his eyes lingering on all manner of poisons and blades and antique rapiers. He plays a game with himself, rates all the objects that he passes on how creatively he could kill himself with them. He doesn’t usually act on it, except the one botched attempt to poison himself through his skin via bathwater, which, embarrassingly enough, only manages to make his skin dry and flaky for a week.

Six months later, during one of his strange kidnap attempts, he rolls out of Mycroft’s car M25, thinking in his last few moments that at least Mycroft will be shocked by the banality of it all.

*

“Sherlock,” Mycroft says, thin and haggard looking, and Sherlock thinks, _weren’t you fatter yesterday?_ so Sherlock says, “Weren’t you fatter yesterday?” He is not in the habit of pretending to have tact when there is only his horrible brother to impress.

“I am going to come over,” Mycroft pants, as if he has been sprinting. “Please do not get in my car and please do not kill yourself, Sherlock.”

Sherlock is furious, and goes to slam the door in his face, but Mycroft wrestles his way into his drab flat. Finally, Mycroft is just standing there, looking sweat-damp and his shoes, Sherlock thinks there is something very strange about them. “We have been through this before, Mycroft, what do you want?”

Mycroft blinked. “We…”

“Yes, six months ago, although…” Sherlock took possession of Mycroft’s hand. There is a scar missing. “Well, _you_ haven’t yet, perhaps. But eventually you will go back to stop me from overdosing.”

“ _When?_ ” Mycroft demanded. “If you didn’t overdose, how will I know what to go back to.”

Sherlock narrowed his eyes. “You’ll figure something out,” he sneered. “Or you won’t, and I’ll finally get some peace. Out, now, please.”

Mycroft goes, and a younger Mycroft arrives at his door in a matter of hours. “Come along, Sherlock. It is Mummy’s birthday, and for once we are going to have a perfectly pleasant meal.”

Sherlock looks at his round brother, bored. “I do not think you are in need of another meal.” he says, with the plummy diplomacy of a polite decline.

*

Sherlock spends another ten years miserable. Somewhere in the middle, he figures out that if he wants results, or to confirm a hunch, or just break the hateful boredom of being alive, all he has to do is look speculatively at the sharpest object in the room. The fact that Mycroft has, by now, spent several million pounds to visit him is an amusing after-thought.

“What do I do?” he asked Mycroft, once.

“I could tell you if you would ever _let me find out,_ ” Mycroft snarls.

“You still have ten minutes here,” Sherlock says, smiling for a change, “tell me about the forensics in 2018. Tell me if we’ve confirmed Jack.”

“Your pet theory will eventually be commonly known, but it may never be confirmed.”

Sherlock swears.

*

Then something spectacular happens.

“Mycroft,” he says, when Mycroft slims to the size he remembers seeing him when he was nineteen and strung out. “I need a favor.”

You cannot go back to meet yourself, because the government has failed to move past superstition and the whole thing is still relatively new, or he wouldn’t have to rely on bloody Mycroft, but the past stands.

Sherlock has spent almost all of his adult life running from his brother who reinvented his history, nudging him along in the world of the living like a cattle prod.

The whole thing was miserable: if he’d known how the whole unbearable business of being alive was going to go proceed, he would have killed himself in utero, at a point where there was literally no room for Mycroft to interfere.

*

After Sherlock dropped out of Cambridge, there was a grimy, miserable flat on Montague. Days passed like years there, and he spent finite eternities sprawled out across a tattered couch, racing thoughts dulled by the only thing he had found in two decades of searching.

There was a long time, after he first discovered the melancholy flatline of self-medicating, where time seemed arbitrary. It was during one of those times that Sherlock blearily stumbled into his narrow bathroom for some facsimile of a shower, and found his brother sitting on the counter. Under the single, flickering overhead lightbulb, Mycroft looked sickly. Actually, Sherlock amended, peering at his face, Mycroft looked _old._

“What are you doing here?” he snapped. Sherlock might have been embarrassed at being caught being in just his pants, but he was in his own flat.

“Oh Sherlock,” Mycroft sighed, eyes soft.

Sherlock wanted to gag. “Do you have a reason to be here? Your diet is obviously going swimmingly. I’ve never seen you look so compatible with standard size doorways?”

“You are going to overdose today,” Mycroft says. “And this is a bad idea. If I can keep you alive until 2012, there is a man named John Watson.”

“What is he, a spy? Your mysteries are of no interest to me, Mycroft.” Sherlock’s eyes narrow as he scans his brother for details. “Although… tell me about the most prominent Jack theories.”

“They’re yours, actually, and if I tell you before you piece it together yourself you’re going to go through your whole life thinking I’ve jilted you.”

Sherlock considers this, and then grins. “I’ll bite. Who is John Watson?”

“He’s ordinary. He’s got a psychosomatic limp, and he trained as an army doctor and for some reason you are quite taken with him.”

Sherlock scoffs. “Leave, Mycroft. I am not in the mood for this.”

“You _are._ You’re the one that asked me to come let you know. You say I’ve been going about it all wrong for two decades.” There is a scar on Mycroft’s hand that Sherlock does not remember. He offers his proof, next, and Sherlock is shaken, because it is exactly the proof Sherlock would send himself. “There are three rats behind in the freezer that you’ve painlessly euthanized this morning, after their experiment ran its course. You privately named them, one of them after Marie Mayer.”

“I haven’t… I don’t…” Sherlock starts, can’t seem to finish. Mycroft gets more and more tense with each passing second and Sherlock can read in the lines of his bunched shoulders that he is running out of time. “Do I end up, do I kill him?”

“He seems happy enough,” Mycroft says, and bless him, he doesn’t look surprised at the question.

“Can I find him now?” Sherlock asks, voice rising in pitch, panicking as his brother starts to fade.

“We’ve – before. I think. But you told me to tell you that he’s worth…”

When Mycroft is gone, Sherlock gives his bathroom the thrashing of a lifetime, shredding wallpaper from the walls, ripping down his shower curtain, sets fire to his towels and leaves them smoldering in his filthy tub.

But he doesn’t get out his kit, like he wants to. Instead, he systematically destroys the rest of his flat. In the morning, he takes the tube all day, deducing the other passengers, each more tedious than the last.

There is a Detective Constable that fails to realize he’s been pickpocketed until he goes to leave, but as soon as he notices, his eyes go straight to Sherlock. Sherlock would be offended if he wasn’t impressed. His face breaks into an accidental grin and he follows him after he gives back his credentials, even though the DC keeps telling him that he _can’t cross that line_ because he’s _just a civilian, kid, no get out of there, what the hell are you doing!?_

_*_

“Afghanistan or Iraq?” Sherlock says, before his brain and eyes and mouth all catch up with each other.

“Sorry?” John Watson says, because by then, Sherlock has all but confirmed that it _is_.

He looks perfectly ordinary, he will give Mycroft that, but Sherlock can smell something beneath the surface, like copper in the water. His pulse skyrockets as he tells him, “The name is Sherlock Holmes.”

Déjà vu settles on him like a warm coat. “And the address is 221B Baker Street.”

He does not say, _I have been waiting for you,_ and he certainly doesn’t say _for thirteen years,_ but at some point he says, “Mycroft, you were right,” and "thank you," to a man who won’t know what he was right about for another decade.


End file.
